50 Who Do You Think You Are?
one; you make them want it so bad that it’s their own idea to have it.
And another person was someone I met along the way as I was
traveling. (I don’t even remember his name actually.) I had a job for a
very short time selling timeshares down in Florida. I only did it for two
weeks because I felt kind of guilty selling time-shares, quite honestly.
This person showed me the next step. I happened to meet one of the
people who started the very first time-share in Spain. He was living in
Orlando, Florida at a very high-end place called Windermere. Windermere
is a beautiful place to live with really big homes. Shaquille O’Neal has a
house there and Michael Jackson has a house there. He brought me to
his home, which is the biggest house I had never seen and he also showed
me his car, which was a Jaguar. I was impressed. Not with the fact that
he had a Jaguar, but that he had it shipped all the way from Germany to
Orlando in order to drive it. He had given me a taste of what the extra
life was. He was an instrumental person because he opened my eyes to
see that people actually do live like this.
Another person who probably changed my life the most was a
teacher I had during my brief year in college. During one of his classes
he talked about one of the greatest books ever written about business
and how it had created more millionaires than any other book. It’s a
book called Think and Grow Rich. He explained the story of Napoleon
Hill and Drew Carnegie and said that if you ever want to be successful in
life you need to buy this book. I took all the change I had and went to the
nearest phone booth and started calling all the bookstores in the area in
order to find the book.
I grew up in a very small town in upstate New York, and I was
really shy at this time. I didn’t want to use public transit because I would
have to see a bunch of strangers on that bus. I was not willing to use the
bus to get to this bookstore. The problem was the bookstore was about 6
miles away. So I ended up walking across town, 6 miles, to this little
bookstore, bought the book Think And Grow Rich, and walked back an-
other 6 miles.
I read the book on my way back as I walked. I skipped classes the
next day to continue reading and I finished the book. Here is where I
would like to say that I read it and my life changed and I’ve never been
the same since, but the truth is, I didn’t get it. I thought to myself, “Why
would someone read this book and become a millionaire- because of
what they read in it?” I knew that there must be something in it, but I
couldn’t place my finger on it. It took me years before I realized the
impact, before my mind was ready to accept what I had learned. I hadn’t